author
Letitia M. Burwell
A memoirist of antebellum Virginia, she left behind one of the better-known first-person accounts of plantation life before the Civil War. Her books are still read today for the window they offer into memory, class, and the Lost Cause tradition.
2 Audiobooks
A Girl's Life in Virginia before the War
by Letitia M. Burwell
Plantation Reminiscences
by Letitia M. Burwell
About the author
Born in 1831 and deceased in 1905, she was the eldest daughter of William M. Burwell of Virginia. She is best known for A Girl's Life in Virginia Before the War (1895), a memoir about her upbringing on a Virginia plantation, and she also wrote Plantation Reminiscences under the pseudonym Page Thacker.
Modern readers often approach her work as both a personal recollection and a historical artifact. Her writing preserves details of domestic life, family routines, and social customs in the antebellum South, while also reflecting the romanticized pro-Confederate memory often described as the Lost Cause.
Because of that mix, her books can be valuable for understanding how some white Southern writers remembered the past after the Civil War. They are especially notable not as neutral history, but as revealing examples of how memory and ideology shaped literary accounts of plantation life.